A Report On The Translation Of Wise Men (Chapter One To Two Of Part One)

This report is written on the basis of the translation of Stuart Nadlers’s novel Wise Men. The novel narrates a story between my father Arthur-Wise and me. With beginning of the crash of Boston Airway, my father Arthur Wise who helps the victims of the crash to win the case brings him a great fortune overnight. A series of problems appear between my father and me from then on. The novel also narrates the homosexuality between my father and Robert-Ashley, the death of our black servant Lem-Dawson, the tragedy of love between Lem’s niece Savannah. The novel is vivid and full of houmour with the ironic language which reflects the racial discrimination of American society and the view on homosexuality at that time.In the process of translation, the translator takes Nida’s "Functional Equivalence" theory as theoretical guidance, that is to say, the ideal translation is the language functional equivalence or the reader’s response equivalence rather than formal equivalence. Nida says that the best translation is to produce in the target language the closet and natural equivalent of the source-language message to make the readers respond in the same way as or similar to the original readers, first is the meaning, and the style. "Functional Equivalence" includes lexical, semantic, contextual and style equivalences. In the guidance of "Functional Equivalence", the writer of the report adopts in her translation of Chapter one and two of the novel some strategies including transformation, amplification, omission, repetition, sentence restructuring, literal translation and free translation and so on.